In 1994 the fastest imaginable connection to the internet was a 289 kbps dial-up modem and email was still mostly a new thing that many people were writing off as a fad There was no such thing as Amazoncom for the first half the year and less than a third of American households owned computers Given that its not much of a surprise that the number of people thinking about voice-activated artificial intelligence AI -enhanced wireless technology was extremely small roughly the same as the number of people putting serious thought into flying cars But the team at Sensory is not quite as surprised by the rapid onset evolution of the voice-activated technology marketplace as everyone else may be because when they were first opening their doors 25 years ago in 1994 this is exactly the world they had hoped to see developing two-and-a-half decades down the line even if the progress has been a bit uneven We still have a long way to go Sensory CEO Todd Mozer told Karen Webster in a recent conversation I am excited about how good speech recognition has gotten but natural language comprehension still needs a lot of work And combined the inputs of all the sensors devices have for vision and speech together to make things really smart and functional in context we just arent there yet But for all there is still be to done and advances that still need to be made the simple fact that the AI-backboned neural net approach to developing for interactive technology has become more powerful than we ever imagined it would be with deep learning is a huge accomplishment in and of itself And the accomplishments are rolling forward he noted as AIs reach and voice control of devices is expanding and embedding and the nascent voice ecosystem is quickly growing into its adolescent phase Today these devices do great if I need the weather or a recipe I think in the future they will be able to do far more than that but they will be increasingly be invisible in the context of what we are otherwise doing Embedding The Intelligence Webster and Mozer were talking on the eve of the launch of Sensorys VoiceGenie for Bluetooth speaker a new product for speaker makers to add voice controls and functions like wake words without needing any special apps or a Wi-Fi connection Said simply Mozer explained what Sensor is offering for Bluetooth makers is embedded voice instead of voice via connection to the cloud And the expansion into embedded AI and voice control he noted is necessary particularly in the era of data breach cyber-crime and good old-fashioned user error with voice technology due to its relative newness There are a lot of sensors on our products and phones that are gathering a lot of interesting information about what we are doing and who we are Mozer said Apart from being a security problem to send all of that information to the cloud embedding in devices the ability to extract usefully and adapt on demand to a particular user is an area of great potential in improving the devices we all use multiple times daily This isnt about abandoning the cloud or even a great migration away from it he said theres always going to be a cloud and clients for it The cloud natively has more power memory and capacity than anything that can be put into a device at this point on a cost-effective basis But there is going to be this back-and-forth and things right now are swinging toward more embedded ability on devices he said There is more momentum in that direction The cloud he noted will always be the home of things like transactions which will have to flow through it But things like verification and authentication he said might be centered in the devices embedded capacity as opposed to in the cloud itself The Power Of Intermediaries Scanning the headlines of late in the world of voice connection and advancing AI it is easy to see two powerful players emerging in Amazon and Google Amazon announced Alexas presence on 100 million devices and Google immediately followed up with an announcement of its own that Google Assistant will soon be available on over a billion devices Their sheer size and scale gives those intermediaries a tremendous amount of power as they are increasingly becoming the connectors for these services on the way to critical mass and ubiquity Webster remarked Mozer agreed and noted that this can look a little scary from the outside looking in particularly given how deeply embedded Amazon and Google otherwise are with their respective mastery of eCommerce and online search Like many complex ecosystems Mozer said that the giants Amazon Google and Apple to a lesser extent are both partners and competitors adding that Sensorys greatest value to the voice ecosystem is when something that is very customized tech and requires a high level of accuracy and customer service features is needed Sensorys technology appears in products by Google Alibaba Docomo and Amazon to name a few But ultimately he noted the marketplace is heading for more consolidation and probably putting more power in the hands of very few selected intermediaries I dont think we are going to have 10 different branded speakers There will be some kind of cohesion someone or maybe two someones will kick butt and dominate with another player struggling in third place And then a lot of players who arent players but want to be Weve seen that in other tech I think we will see it with voice As for who those winning players will be Google and Amazon look good today but Mozer noted its still early in the race The Future of Connectedness In the long term future Mozer said we may someday look back on all these individual smart devices as a strange sort of clutter from the past when everyone was making conversation with different appliances At some point he ventured we may just have sensors embedded in our heads that allow us to think about commands and have them go through no voice interface necessary That sounds like science fiction but I would argue it is not as far out there as you think It wont be this decade but it might be in the next 50 years But in the more immediate and less Space Age future he said the next several years will be about enhancing and refining voice technologies ability to understand and respond to human voice and ultimately to anticipate the needs of human users There wont be a killer app for voice that sets it on the right path according to Mozer it will simply be a lot of capacity unlocked over time that will make voice controls the indispensable tools Sensory has spent the last 25 years hoping they would become When a device is accurate in identifying who you are and carrying out your desires seamlessly that will be when it finds its killer function It is not a thing that someone is going to snap their fingers and come out with he said it is going to be an ongoing evolution LATEST INSIGHTS Our data and analytics team has developed a number of creative methodologies and frameworks that measure and benchmark 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